The Thick Blue Line

Yesterday at a local pharmacy, I found myself standing outside in the mid-morning sun behind a thick blue duct-taped line. It was the establishment’s noble attempt at social distancing. The pharmacy was only permitting a certain number of customers in at a time. There were thick blue lines to stand behind inside, too.

On another front, I noticed this past week a police cruiser with flashing lights in front of a neighborhood supermarket. Apparently the place requires law-enforcement presence to at once maintain social distancing and order. I shop nearby at this so-called gourmet market—i.e., more expensive prices on most things, including the ordinary—that is not yet rationing the number of people allowed in the store. It has, though, devised various detours and a novel waiting-on-line procedure to keep one and all sufficiently apart. Honestly, I don’t think it’s working as planned. Anyway, it’s startling to see this market, which once upon a time put a premium on presentation and fully stocked shelves. Now it looks like General Sherman’s army has passed through it on their March to the Sea.

Really, it’s unsettling enough to be shopping amidst mayhem, but I can do without a raving lunatic added to the general pandemonium. Today it was this middle-aged guy—who wasn’t wearing a mask, by the way—loudly jabbering away about Governor Cuomo. He assigned the governor full blame for the lengthy circuitous line and out-of-stocks in the market. Another annoying fellow was on said line, but kept leaving his cart unattended to secure more booty. Get on line or get off of it!

Witnessing so many people with their shopping carts piled high, my thoughts led me back to a simpler time, the 1970s, and a very special grocery store. Actually, it was a pantry in a neighbor’s basement. The teen-aged me dubbed it “the grocery store” because its shelves were always full of every canned good and non-perishable item imaginable. This family wasn’t about to go hungry during a pandemic, nuclear war, or Category 5 hurricane. The wind beneath the wings of that one-of-a-kind grocery store was the man of the house who worked at Grand Union, an area supermarket chain that has gone the way of the Great Auk. I vividly recall him arriving home on summer evenings with box loads of foods, foodstuffs, and more to keep the grocery store well stocked for that inevitable rainy day.

While revisiting that colorful snapshot in time, I thought about being a kid then as opposed to now. In those days, we spent a great deal of time outdoors. Being under house arrest, as it were, would have been a big deal. But being cooped up in the house is the norm for contemporary youth and where they want to be. They spend most of their free time inside, pandemic or no pandemic, staring at their iPhones and notepads. 

Some forty and fifty years ago, my thoughts were on more temperate weather and baseball during the first few weeks of spring. So the calendar decreed: Break out the mitts and have a catch. This simple act of social distancing is what so many of us did on countless occasions from March through October. Yes, it was an outside world that we lived in and there was always something to do, even if it was just a catch. Sheltering in place would have seriously cramped our styles. 

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)